Monday, February 20, 2017

Open and Education are concepts that fit together and compliment each other
incredibly well.

Open and Education are concepts that fit together and compliment each other
incredibly well. We will look at one aspect, the overlap of open source and education that is
open educational resources (OER). For something that is such a natural fit,
OER is comparatively unknown and underutilized.

teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise,
that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license
that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with
no or limited restrictions.
World
Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress

This permissive licensing is the minimum requirement for OER. What is the
"much more" that I referred to in the tweet? What more can we do to increase the value
of OER, both for the educational community and for the producers of the content?
Can we build something akin to a rubric for accessing the value of an open
educational project and how well we put that project to use?

The value and perception of OER strongly depends on perspective. OER presents
different value propositions to educational institutions that consume them,
students that consume them, educational institutions that produce them, and
companies that produce them. And perhaps the most important value proposition,
and definitely the least appreciated, the value to the student who produces
content.

Licensing

We have established the minimum requirement of a permissive license. These
licenses take many forms, ranging to completely unfettered, public domain,
content to the GNU AGPL
V3 and the Creative Commons
noncommercial noderivatives license. Arguably, this last example is so
restrictive that it is not an open license.

As soon as a work is created, it is
protected by copyright. As soon as a story is written, a painting made, a
photograph taken, or a film shot, it is copyrighted. This means that the creator,
or their employer, owns the intellectual property rights for the original work.
Like other forms of property, the owner can sell those rights, trade them, or
simply give them away.

This is why there are so many different open source licenses, and so many uses of
the phrase open educational resources. The creator of the original intellectual
property can follow almost any path they want to share, trade, or sell it. The license
is the terms that the creator attaches to the use of their creation.

Luckily, one of the most popular open license sets, Creative Commons, has
a very good explanation
of their licenses. One of the reasons for their popularity is the simplicity
and straight forward nature of their licenses, and their focus on content, not
software. If you are looking for an open source license for your content, this
is a great place to start. GitHub, a large open source repository, also provides
a guide for choosing an open license,
this one targeted more to the software development community.

An interesting side effect of attaching a permissive license to your work is
that you are immediately conscious of the need to design the project for uses
and interests beyond your own. It's still early and we have already touched
on constructionism.

Cost

The cost of textbooks, and education in general, is increasing dramatically. This is placing an
increasing burden on students and school districts.

OERs promise to displace much of this cost. As tempting as it may be, it is important that schools and
school districts not simply fixate on the cost savings. The most promising path includes a feedback loop
where the the consumers of OER also invest in its improvement. Redirect some of the cost savings to resources
for developing and obtaining expertise around the use of OER, and over a slightly longer term develop the
ability to contribute to the creative process. Repeating this feedback loop over even a fraction of the
3 million teachers in the US will create a powerful force behind the improvement and adoption of open
educational resources.

Value

A4: There are endless #OERs out there! As a teacher you need to be willing to investigate & find what works for you! #EdTechBridge#uneedu

Just because it is free and open does not make it a good fit for education,
moreover, it does not make it a good fit for your classroom. Conversely,
even if the content is not targeted to education, you may find it a great fit to
your class. So what are some of the things we need to look for the evaluate the
usefulness and fit of a particular open educational resource?

The 5Rs

Ideally, OER provides all 5 of these values, commonly refreeed to as the 5Rs.

Retain: Users have the right to make, archive, and "own" copies of the content;

Reuse: Content can be reused in its unaltered form;

Revise: Content can be adapted, adjusted, modified or altered;

Remix: The original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new;

Redistribute: Copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.

Retention can have a surprisingly strong effect, especially for students who normally can not markup and
retain their text from year to year.

Correctness

A common and basic criteria for any resource, educational or not, open or
not, is correctness. Instructional material, no matter how well written, well
designed, or well marketed, is worse than useless if it is not correct. A messaging
utility is a poor investment if it loses data or misdirects messages, no matter
the cost.

Open source materials have a clear advantage here. The inclusive, community driven,
nature of open source makes it more likely that the community will provide constructive
feedback. A well organized open source project will invite the community
to contribute updates and corrections directly. Such constructive community involvement
is important for the health of open source projects.

Pedagogy

You can not talk about educational resources without talking about pedagogy.
However, open resources can be used directly to teach, they can be used
as resources in a larger project, or they can themselves be the target of
an educational project. The evaluation of any resource will depend on how
it is integrated into your class.

Many open resources encourage you to adapt and mix them with your own content
and sometimes other content. When open content is mixed into existing content,
evaluation is based on fundamentally different questions. Now we must look
first at how the new content compliments the existing content.

Does it fill in a gap?

Does it present the same material through a different lens?

And most importantly, does it integrate with your content and with your presentation style?

It is important to select data from high quality sources. It is easy to find data
that is reflects bias on the part of the researcher or collection agency.

A far richer set of options is available for #OER than for a packaged end product
because the open product is more open to mixing into the complete solution.

We will see a little bit later how a well organized open source project is
more likely to get this, and many other factors, right than other approaches.

Myths

There are also a
number of myths surrounding open source material. This results in additional
effort to rework or reinvent already existing solutions. Experience has shown that
where it is reasonable, it is better to utilize an existing solution and implement
customizations and additions where necessary.

To be honest, using OER does require more effort, deeper thought, and a greater level of expertise than more
traditional approaches. But we are all in the 90th percentile, right? Further, if we distribute this effort
among us all, and form a strong ecosystem, the effort will be reduced dramatically. This is one of the main goals
for this writeup. To get you involved not only in using, but in contributing to the OER ecosystem.

Usability

It is almost a tradition that open source products have poor usability.
The target audience has often made the tradeoff of cost vs usability
and polish. For educational content though, this is largely an
unacceptable tradeoff. Wrestling with the design or interface will
quickly distract and alienate the learner.

Much progress has been made on this front over the past several years,
with open source products matching and sometime eclipsing their shrink
wrapped rivals.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a close cousin to usability. Instruction, no matter
how amazing it might be, is of little value if the learner can not
access it.

So, what are the big barriers of accessibility. The traditional set
of barriers are physical limitations such as blindness or hearing
loss. Addressing these requires both intent and specialized knowledge.

Once again, feedback is important. A development community will almost never
have complete coverage of the spectrum of hardware and software in use. Systems
and combinations where things misbehave are important to know. Further, accessibility
can be a strong differentiator in online reviews of content.

New with the advent of technology is the so called digital divide. We can
quickly recognize the opportunity for both
lower cost and higher quality resources. However, a closer look quickly
reveals that to take advantage of these opportunities, such as replacing
printed commercial textbooks with open digital content, required widespread
digital devices, connectivity and expertise. These things are not equally
distributed. So, perversely, free resources can actually increase the digital
divide.

Technology is such an important aspect of modern education that addressing the
digital divide is a priority for local, state
and federalgovernments.

The BYOD trend is another two edged sword. Students using their own devices to
access and work with open educational resources is a powerful concept. It moves
learning beyond specific devices and content provided by the school into a more
real world context. This breaks the association of learning is something that happens
in the classroom and transform it into a lifelong process that happens everywhere.
However, it brings the unequal access to technology into sharp focus.

Even when students can keep OER, with their own notes and additions, after the course is
over, it is of limited use if they don't have their own device. This is another example of
how the educational, and OER, ecosystem is complex and layered. But that just means that
there are many avenues to contribute.

Availability & Findability

Even the best content has limited value if you can't find it. This means that you
have to know to look for it, and there has to be an easy path to find it. This is
the first time we will see a significant business value behind OER as the open
content becomes part of the sales funnel. OER can be a great way to quickly gain market
awareness, and, as we will see, to build a strong user community.

Google
Trends gives us an interesting picture of interest in a few OER topics, and how it has changed over time.

PhET stands out with its strong increase in search queries and brand identity.

Of these terms, the most striking thing is that only PhET
shows a strong upward trend. Interest in Creative Commons
has a gentle raise until late 2011, then shows a slight decline over time. Even Khan Academy enjoyed a spike from a March 2012 60 Minutes
story but was flat afterwards.

It's also interesting to look at the web traffic
rankings for some of the largest OER collections. We throw in Pearson, a high profile,
but not open, education company for comparison. The open education sites have respectable
numbers with the well connected Khan Academy leading the traffic race. Apparently marketing
is effective for OER. No one organization has a commanding presence in the OER marketplace
leaving considerable room for growth and evolution.

The table shows a snapshot of traffic for select OER sites. We clearly see these sites have a slightly higher
proportion of traffic in the US than the rest of the world. Also interesting is how that traffic is changing
over time. They are showing significant growth over time, with OpenStax as an extreme case.

The traffic for OpenStax shows a massive increase over the past year, likely due to expanded use of their
textbooks.

Comparing traffic statistics with search trends leads to some interesting conclusions. While clearly
dominaning traffic, Khan Academy is far from the most active search term. PhET, which dominates search,
is closer to the mean for traffic.

Clearly the principle driver for traffic to many educational sites is not brand search. Indeed, for the
author, virtually no traffic comes from beand driven search. Almost all traffic comes from content driven
subject matter search. Reputation and referrals from faculty and students also has a significant impact
on overall traffic.